The restructuring of energy utilities worldwide is changing the way energy utilities conduct business. In particular utilities are becoming more concerned about reducing the cost of operation and maintenance and improving the efficiency of resource utilization and customer service satisfaction in order to stay competitive in the changing business environment.
As a result, increasingly, energy utility companies are recognizing the value of benchmarking and performance assessment processes as an essential means of evaluating their operational and financial performance against current and potential competitors. The process of benchmarking and performance assessment also provides useful information to non-utility parties. Such parties may be investors or vendors interested in identifying new business opportunities and providing complete systems solutions to utilities with poor business performance.
Naturally, such benchmarking techniques require large amounts of raw data. In fact, such large amounts of energy utility data are available in the public domain for most developed countries around the world, from which a number of commercial database products have been developed.
Further, utility evaluation methods also do exist. However, the usefulness of such procedures has been limited either due to the need for extensive user involvement and data requirement or due to excessive simplicity with only a few predefined inputs used for analysis.
Thus, the primary objective of this invention is to introduce a performance based business assessment method that is computer based and uses an extensive, comprehensive database of publicly available data, as well as a standardized performance assessment procedure to develop insight into the relative strengths and weaknesses of a utility.
In addition existing evaluation tools have been unable to provide a standardized methodology for composite overall ranking for a utility under evaluation. That is, where comparison between the utility being evaluated (i.e., the “target”) and the benchmark group is based on individual performance ratios or performance indicators, there is typically no single utility that performs best in every business area. Thus, it would be desirable to have a methodology for relative weighting of performance indicators so that composite ranking for utilities under evaluation might be obtained.